The invention relates to aggregating data with complex operations.
There are a variety of Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) techniques that allow a user to analyze multidimensional data stored in a database. Typically, the database includes a “fact table” that has a number of dimensions (or “key fields”) storing values that serve as indices into the multidimensional data and a number of attributes (or “non-key fields”) storing other values. A user can perform queries on the data that involve computing aggregates of the multidimensional data. To increase the efficiency of such queries, typical OLAP schemes pre-compute some of the possible aggregates.